Shinzo Abe
September 21, 1954 - July 8, 2022
aged 67 years
The longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history, Mr. Abe retired as Prime Minister of Japan in September 2020. Abe came from an old and influential political family, and in retirement he remained a very influential figure here, and perhaps the most recognized Japanese politician at home and abroad. Abe was gunned down at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, July 8th in the city of Nara (near Kyoto) while making a campaign speech on the street in support of Kei Sato, the local Liberal Democratic Party candidate in general elections scheduled for Sunday, July 10th. Elections in Japan are always held on a Sunday. The shooter, 41-year-old Nara City resident Testuya Yamagami, seems to have used a home-made weapon.
Politically-motivated gun violence against national politicians is so rare that is seems like an artifact from distant history. This kind of lethal political violence hasn't been seen in Japan since Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh was gunned down in April 2007 by yakuza gangster Tetsuya Shiroo. Before that, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s controversial 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death on the street outside his home in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, in July 1991. (It has always been presumed that his murder was related to his translation of Rushdie’s book.) The case remains unsolved. Before that was the February 1972 Asama-Sanso Incident in Karuizawa, Nagano when the extremist United Red Army killed 14 members of its own group (who weren’t radical enough, I guess) during a hostage drama that is still talked about today. And before that, Japan Socialist Party Chairman Inejiro Asanuma was knifed to death by right-wing activist Otoya Yamaguchi in 1960 in Tokyo’s Hibiya Public Hall (a building I recently visited).
Guns are so rare in Japan that the idea of gun violence is difficult to process. And, Japanese have no experience with the emotional and political aftermath of gun violence.
Japanese politics is pregnant with corruption, bribery, and back-room wheeling and dealing. There’s a lot of back scratching here.
Foreign media abound with the word “assassination.” But it is a word almost absent from Japanese media. The Japan Times Weekend edition print newspaper used the word “assassinated” in its frontpage headline on Saturday, July 10th. But Japanese-language print and television media only reported that Mr. Abe “died” after being “attacked.” There is a cultural reason for that, I suppose. Japanese media don’t hesitate to use the Japanese word for “assassination” (“ansatsu”) when reporting the violent deaths of foreign leaders. But since a politically-motivated murder is so exceptional in post-war Japan, the media tend to avoid the word here.
And yet, many in the media rushed to portray the murder as a political thing - an attack on Japanese democracy - and subsequently ran news articles about the government bravely refusing to bow to threats to free expression, and rejecting threats to democracy. Yeah, yeah. That’s not it. The shooter chose Abe for personal reasons - reasons that sound rather lame and pathetic to foreign ears, because they are lame and pathetic - reasons centered on Abe’s supposed connection to a religious group that swindled and bankrupted the man’s mother. I don’t know if it’s true, but the fact is that in this country a connection like that is entirely possible. In Japan, there are dozens of Buddhist sects, some quite ancient, rich and powerful with tendrils throughout society. In national politics there is the Komeito Party (a coalition partner with Mr. Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party), which stems from the Soka Gakkai Buddhist religious movement. And, Japanese politics is pregnant with corruption, bribery, and back-room wheeling and dealing. There’s a lot of back scratching here. In this case, the “religious group” in question turned out to be the Korea-based Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, widely knows as the Unification Church, or the “Moonies,” founded by Sun Myung Moon in 1954.
Abe was respected and well-liked, however. His longevity provided a political stability that Japanese enjoyed, and he was cast as a great statesman. He had opponents over policy issues because he was both an historical revisionist and a nationalist. But he was not an extremist, and Japanese society is not polarized like it is in, say, America. Furthermore, he wasn’t the prime minister anymore. That someone would shoot him dead just stuns Japanese. It’s unbelievable! His death leaves a political void, and it generated sympathy that contributed to a strong LDP showing in national general elections on July 10th. Prime Minister Kishida has finally secured the ⅔ majority he needs in both houses of the parliament (the National Diet), to proceed with conservatives’ dream of amending the pacifist Article 9 of the Constitution.
Tempers rarely run high in Japanese politics.
Japan has extremely strict gun laws, and we live in a kind of safety bubble here. This kind of violence punctures our safety bubble. It’s unbelievable. Murders are more likely to occur here using knives or kitchen poisons. Mass killings are sometimes perpetrated through gasoline-fueled arson. Tempers rarely run high in Japanese politics. Security for sitting PMs is predictably very tight, but not so for former Prime Ministers. That may change from now.
They hang people in Japan.